22Slides

Five years ago today, we launched 22Slides with modest expectations and the intention of providing the best service we possibly could. Now, our clients span over 60 countries and we’re happy to be able to say we still offer the same one-on-one experience as always. Rather than celebrating too much though, we’re working hard on new stuff to be released soon, but in the meantime, here’s what’s new:

New Image Gallery Layout

We introduced a new “Blocks” image gallery layout, which allows for large thumbnails and perfectly-aligned negative space all the way around your page. Check it out by viewing one of your image galleries in your design editor.

Free Domain Names

We’re very happy to announce that our friends at Hover.com have been kind enough to offer free domain names (for one year) to 22Slides customers. So if you haven’t bought yourself a custom domain name for your website, now’s the time to do it. Go to your settings page, then click “setup a custom domain”. It’ll guide you through the process.

We made a few display and usability improvements to image gallery pages too.

• The ESC and ↓ keys will now close photo overlays/lightboxes.
• A new “X” button has been added to overlays/lightboxes too, to make it dead obvious how to close an image.
• We added support for non-square Instagram photos.
• Image descriptions now respect line breaks.

New “Updates” Page

Rather than send emails or write blog posts about every little change we make to our system, we’ve introduced a new “updates” page to the control panels. Whenever there’s a new feature or a change made, there will be a small green circle at the top of your control panel to let you know. You can click the circle and see exactly what we’ve been working on.

Image Handling Improvements

Image upload speed has been improved 300% by adding more servers to handle the files, and we now automatically wipe out all image metadata so you don’t have to worry about people decoding your files to try and find out your settings and post-processing workflow. We DO, however, still keep ICC profiles so everything is still displayed as intended.

Lots of Other Stuff

• A revised sign in page now makes it easy to find and reset your password.
• New, even stronger military-grade password encryption and an improved password reset process have been implemented.
• We added the sender’s IP address to emails sent from a contact form, so you can find information about anyone trying to send anonymous messages.
• New receipt/reminder emails are now sent each month, to ensure no one is ever paying for an account they forgot they had.
• We redesigned the “content” page, improving the appearance of your pages, as well as making the drag-and-drop functionality work much better.
• We now keep closed/cancelled accounts around for 3 months instead of the previous 2, to provide a longer grace period should a client change their mind.
• We made improvements to page redirects to help new sites retain maximum SEO performance when making major changes.
• We added a new optional EU cookies law-compliant notice for those of you in Europe, which can be found on your settings page.

We’re happy to announce our favorite domain registrar, Hover.com, is now offering free domains to 22Slides customers for one year (which is around a $15 value).

If you don’t already have a custom domain name for your website, or were thinking of registering another one, head over to the “settings” page of your control panel and redeem yours now!

We’ve had the pleasure of helping Bryan with his first photography website a few years ago, and have been blow away by his progress ever since.

He’s since grown to be one of the more popular photographers on social media with some of the most captivating landscape photos out there, earning clients like Nike, LG, and US Bank in the process.

Check out his website and Instagram account to see more of his work!

BryanDaugherty.com Instagram Twitter Tumblr

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Who are you, what have you done, and why the heck would anyone want to read this?

My name is Bryan Daugherty and I am a 25 year old adventure and lifestyle photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. I am a social influencer and have worked on global campaigns with clients such as Nike, Herschel Supply and LG.

How were you introduced to photography, and how long have you been shooting?

I first got into photography about 3 years ago when I got my first iPhone. From that moment, I was hooked. Constantly taking photos and uploading them for my friends to see. I started to build relationships with the people around me who shared the same interests. I took any advice that I could and learned as much as possible. What started out as a hobby, became my passion and job.

What kind of work is your favorite, and why?

My favorite kind of work to do right now is product shots. I am pretty new to it and its a challenge for me.

Which equipment could you not live without?

My current camera is a Canon 5D Mark III. I have 4 lenses: a Canon 24mm f1.4L, Sigma 35mm f1.4 Art, Canon 50mm f1.4 and a Canon 70-200 f2.8L II IS. My favorite lens is definitely the 24mm because you can shoot landscapes and portraits with it.

If you could have done one thing different with your career so far, what would it be?

I would have started shooting at a younger age. I didn’t start shooting until I was already in college so it made me question what I wanted to do all the time.

What other photographers’ work do you enjoy the most?

My favorite photographers right now are Ravi Vora (@Ravivora), Scott Borrero (@scottborrero), Alex Strohl (@alexstrohl) and Sam Fan (@samalive). They are constantly pushing the boundaries of creativity and telling a story.

If you weren’t a photographer, what would you be doing?

If I wasn’t a photographer, I would love to be in the advertising/marketing world. I’ve had a small glimpse into what that’s like and it’s something I may pursue in the future.

What was your single biggest obstacle in turning your hobby into a career, and how did you beat it?

My biggest obstacle in my career was making the decision to go full time freelance. I recently made this decision and I had to choose between continuing my education or sticking with my passion. At this point in my career, the benefits of going full time freelance outweighed those of continuing my education.

What are you thoughts on photographers using services like Instagram to post their work?

I think Instagram is a great way to stay inspired and share work with others. In 2012 I decided to download Instagram and back then the app was much different and it was not nearly as popular as it is now but the idea was the same. The thought of being able to capture a moment, post it and get instant feedback from a community of photographers and friends is what really drew me to the app. In July of 2014, I received a direct message from the @instagram account informing me that they put me on the Suggested User list. In the 2 weeks that I was on the Suggested User list, I went from 4,000 followers to 46,000. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this has had a massive impact on my career. I work with agencies to create sponsored posts and content for brands on Instagram as well as work on global campaigns.

What’s your photo editing software and/or process of choice?

I use Photoshop and Lightroom. Lightroom for basic edits/tweaks and photoshop for retouching. I have my own presets that I made based off of a few of the VSCO film presets.

Domains are confusing. There’s no reason a normal person should have to worry about CNAME records or things like that.

This is why we’ve partnered with Hover.com to provide 1-click domain setups for your 22Slides site. Now, instead of carefully editing your DNS records yourself to get your website to work, you need only to click a button and it’s all done fore you.

We’re constantly working to increase the value our service provides to our clients, and today we’re happy to announce the addition of PayPal “Buy Now” buttons!

You can now quickly assign prices to images on your site to sell things like prints and collect payments via your PayPal account.

To try it out, find the “PayPal” section in your “Add-ons” page of your control panel and enter your PayPal email address. Then you can “flip” any image on your website over by clicking the icon at the bottom right of its thumbnail and enter pricing options there. That’s it!

Over the last few months, the name of our game has been refinement: We launched a new home page at 22Slides.com that features a more polished look at feel, reminiscent of the classic European photographic equipment we draw much of our inspiration from, as well as made tons of small improvements throughout our system, some of which are listed below:

Websites

• Added the ability to remove “22” logo from websites, to allow a completely custom look
• Added support for HTTP redirects
• Added support for our download blocker add-on to sites’ home pages
• Improved current page indicators and URLs when using custom home pages
• Improved referral spam blocking
• Added classes to different types of Tumblr blog posts to allow unique styling for each type of content
• Fixed numeric alphabetization of files in the Dropbox file manager add-on
• Improved small alignments of default skin in areas
• Added {year} variable to copyright notices, to allow custom copyright notices that automatically update with the current year

Control Panel

• New WYSIWYG text editor to allow text to be formatted without the need for Markdown
• Increased image upload limit from 23MP to 25MP to better accommodate more common full-resolution images
• Revamped page creation process, eliminating some steps to make the process faster
• Fixed thumbnail cropping in latest versions of Google Chrome
• Added indicator that points out which page has just been created or edited
• Subtle design changes to help communicate which elements on different pages are editable
• Changed language on payment page to be more clear for European areas
• Made “changes saved” feedback notification more visible
• Fixed page naming issue that would sometime add a “-1” to the end of a page’s URL when it wasn’t necessary

Mobile Sites

• Enabled mobile site add-on by default
• Moved mobile navigation button to the right, to better-accommodate one-hand use with today’s larger phones
• Improved appearance of “blurbs” in the navigation
• Removed arrows from navigation items that aren’t drop down menus, to reduce clutter
• Added support for custom copyright notices in the footer

If you’ve ever been concerned about losing valuable search engine placement when reorganizing your website, renaming pages, or even when switching to 22Slides from another website service, we just introduced the ability to remedy this by creating permanent 301 HTTP redirects.

For example, if you have a popular page on your site at the address “portfolio-ii” and you’d like to rename it to something like “portraits”, now you can create a redirect from the old address to the new one and retain all your search engine points.

Also, if you’re switching to 22Slides from another service, you don’t need to worry about losing your most valuable pages’ search engine value. You can simply create redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.

We’ve joined Instagram! Follow us at @22slides.

We’ll be using the account less for announcing things to do with 22Slides itself, but rather to feature some of the great work our customers do.

If you’re a client of ours and would like us to feature some of your work, just let us know, or tag your photos with “#22slides”.

Today we made a big decision about a very small feature: We added the ability to remove the 22Slides branding from our websites.

Since the beginning, we’ve relied quite heavily on this little logo to get new clients, so removing it is a big deal to us. Cutting out a major source of leads isn’t exactly a typical business practice, but we feel it is something that our existing clients will appreciate (and we think it’s more important to cater to our existing clients than chase new ones).

The option can be found toward the bottom of your “Settings” page in your control panel. Enjoy!

We’ve just replaced our old Markdown editor with a new WYSIWYG editor for text pages that will make formatting your text, changing styles, alignment, adding links, contact forms, etc much easier.

Along with this change comes a few more smaller refinements as well, like a redesigned UI for changing a text page’s layout, automatic email obfuscation (to help defend against spammers), and helpers for adding images and video to your text pages too.